Preferring pervert to profane

“The colour of the paint is absolutely ****ing lovely,” I wrote in a post on a forum. It was my intention to be ironically effusive with my appreciation of the item in question, and I assumed the self parody was sufficiently blatant. Asterisks were used to spare the sensibilities of those most easily offended. “If I told you quite how lovely it was,” my post continued, “I’d probably need a box of Kleenex. But what I need to know about the product is …”

“I’ve removed the thinly veiled swearing. If you know you have to cover it up, you know it’s not allowed” wrote one of the forum moderators in response. My post now read “The colour of the paint is absolutely lovely. If I told you quite how lovely it was, I’d probably need a box of Kleenex …”

I was puzzled. My use of thinly veiled swearing was apparently offensive, but an even more thinly veiled reference to masturbation and ejaculating was less so?

As I understand it, Americans for example, can be far more sensitive to bad language than we potty mouthed Brits. A prime example cropped up in Battlestar Galactica (Ser 4, Ep 3), “The Ties That Bind“. [Ed: Don’t worry Dear Reader. AM has not substituted his obsession with sex for nostalgically reimagined sci-fi TV series. He had to do quite a bit of searching to track down which episode was involved and thereby verify the exact quote.] In it, the self destructive anti-heroine, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace …

… gets utterly caught up in the script writers delusion that the audience won’t be irritated by their relentless use of the word frak. So much so that, in the heat of an argument, she utters the immortal line “I wanna frak […] All I wanna do right now is frak. Really frak like it’s the end of the world and nothing else matters.” [See video bellow at aprox 1 minute in. Unless of course you’re offended by the wordfrak.]

I swear quite a lot (Oft quoted research suggests that means I am probably quite a creative person.) so swearing tends to wash over me. But when typing asterisks is more offensive than the suggestion that I might be inspired to whip my cock out, take a firm grip on it, and stroke it till I need to wipe semen from my fingers, Dear Reader, I have to say I really don’t understand the world.